Miles Lerman: A Leading Force Behind Holocaust Museum, Dies at 88

Miles Lerman, a Jewish resistance fighter in Nazi-occupied Poland who was a major figure in creating the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and persuading Soviet bloc countries to give it thousands of artifacts of the Holocaust, died on Tuesday at his home in Philadelphia. He was 88.

The death was confirmed by his daughter, Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer.

Mr. Lerman was chairman of the museum’s governing council from the time it opened on the Mall on April 22, 1993, until 2000. But his work to create the six-story building near the Washington Monument, with its silence-inducing exhibition spaces leading to an eternal flame in the Hall of Remembrance, began in 1979. That year, President Jimmy Carter named Mr. Lerman to the advisory board of the President’s Commission on the Holocaust, with the mission of building the museum.